


you better run, better run

by Muir_Wolf



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-09
Updated: 2014-11-09
Packaged: 2018-02-24 17:00:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2589308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Muir_Wolf/pseuds/Muir_Wolf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>She doesn’t realize how good running felt until she can’t.</i>
</p><p> </p><p>Raven character study; Raven/Wick.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you better run, better run

  


-

She doesn’t realize how good running felt until she can’t.

-

Her grandfather had a book that her mom gave her when she was seven. (Her mom loved her, and Raven knows it. She thinks it would’ve been easier if she hadn’t. She thinks learning love isn’t enough is the hardest lesson there is.) Her grandfather had a book, and it’s the only thing of her entire family that she ever kept, the only thing that was never bartered or traded away. She left it behind to get to Finn. She left it behind to get to Clarke for Abby.

She didn’t need it anyway. The only reason she’d kept it was the words scrawled inside the front cover: _“When you can’t run anymore, you crawl.”_

There’s a second half to that quote, but she crossed it out when she was nine and curled up in her bunk, her stomach eating itself out until all she had left in her were the tears she wanted to be too fierce to shed. Nobody was going to carry her.

-

Running was nothing on the Ark. Running meant disruption, meant attention—the bad kind. Running used up precious oxygen, running was mandated at certain times to ensure appropriate muscle mass and heart health, but only at the right times, only in the right places, only when you were told to.

Running is life on Earth. Running is the difference between living and dying, and sometimes, when she’s going so fast she can hardly hear past her heart beating, sometimes it’s the closest she’s ever come to flying on the ground.

They take space from her, and she’ll run if she can’t float. They take her leg, and what does she have left?

-

This is what she has left: 

She has two hands that tighten around the frame of the bed as she pulls herself up to a sitting position.

She has a brain that she can still strangle control over. (She’s used to drowning out the panic, isn’t she? Youngest zero-g mechanic in fifty two years, and she didn’t get that way by panicking, didn’t get that way by letting her flight or fight instinct drown out her mind.)

She has herself, she has Raven, she has the person she built out of her skin, out of a hollowed stomach and stick-thin wrists. She has the person she has made, and remade, and will remake as many times as needed. She did not shatter when she let Finn go. She did not shatter when Finn was arrested. She did not shatter when her mom walked away and walked away and walked away, and finally did not return.

-

Abby watches her, like if she can’t save Clarke, maybe she can save Raven. Raven doesn’t think this to be unkind; she likes Abby. She’d do a lot for Abby—more than she’s already done. She knows Abby thinks she used Raven, can see it in her eyes, but Raven used Abby, too, and she doesn’t regret it.

(Raven may not be one for being carried, but her shoulders have always been strong enough to hold someone else up. Maybe she didn’t realize this on the Ark, maybe when you’re floating in zero-g, weight doesn’t seem so important, but Raven is strong, strong, strong. Will always be as strong as she has to be.)

-

She asks Abby to point her to someone who can help her make crutches. Chancellor Abby, now, and she’d laugh about these Griffin women and the way they fall into power, except Abby was ready to float to get her to Earth, and when Clarke said she’d pick Raven first, Raven had believed her. It’s no little thing to have power, and Raven went long enough without it to know how important it really is, but she’ll take what she deserves, and no more.

So that is what she asks Abby, Abby with the sometimes guilty eyes, Abby who would do more for her if Raven applied the right pressure, used her again, used her to get to what she wants. But Raven’s scope has narrowed, and the things she wants are no longer so easy to get to. (Distance she could float across, run across, crawl across. This is a chasm, and she is keeping herself from falling, but only just.) Raven wants to run, but if she can’t run, she’ll find a way to carry herself.

-

Abby sends Wick.

-

Raven remembers Wick. Two thousand and some people, and that’s too many people to know, but too few to not know _of_ , on some level, by some degree. They ran in the same sort of circles, and maybe they met once or twice, maybe she saw him talking to a friend of a friend across the mess, maybe she remembers hearing about when he got picked to apprentice for Sinclair.

Raven remembers Wick, but this is not the Wick she remembers, because she knew a name and a face, and nothing more. 

His eyes are dark and serious when he follows Abby into the room, and she wonders, fleetingly, if she looked as out of place on Earth when she landed as he does now. He smiles when he sees her, smiles when he tells her he can help her, smiles when he waves Abby goodbye, but it doesn’t reach his eyes until she makes a joke about rigging an anti-grav unit for her so she can just float away from the Grounders.

“Youngest in fifty-two years,” he says, and it should be white noise to her at this point, so many people have said that to her in her life, but it’s more than reaffirmation, it’s acknowledgement. He remembers her, too.

And after that, after his smile reaches his eyes that first time, he doesn’t stop until her smile reaches hers, too.

-

This is how it goes wrong:

One: His hand on her arm as if she needs to be protected.

Two: Handing her a gun as he lifts his own.

Three: “I’m not going to leave you behind, you fucking idiot, now will you stop being a martyr and instead come up with a better plan? I’m just the beauty, Raven, you’re the brains of this outfit.”

“I can be both,” she says, the need to banter somehow overriding her getting him out of there.

“Then be both, gorgeous, but be both _faster._ ”

Four: His hands on her waist as he lifts her up to the lowest branch, and she can feel her heart beating madly again, can hear it so loud that she has to focus through the noise to hear the Grounders in the (slowly-closing) distance. But she has two strong hands, and she pulls as he pushes.

Five: Her hand on his shirt as she tugs him close, as she watches his eyes dip towards her mouth and then back up to meet hers.

-

(That is how it went right.)

-

She's tired, and her shoulders are aching, her armpits sore from the crutches, her good leg overused.

“Wick,” she says. Just that, just that and that alone, and she’s known him three weeks, maybe, but he turns to her like he knows her, like he knows what she’s asking, when she herself is only just now realizing what she wants.

“ _Finally,_ ” he says, smirking over his shoulder as he steps in front of her, offering his back, “you sure know how to make a guy feel useless. I was about to give up hope.”

She laughs, and shoves the small of his back lightly, just enough to make him stumble, but she accepts the piggy-back ride nonetheless.

-

_“When you can’t run, you crawl. And when you can’t do that, you find someone to carry you.”_

-

(Six: Her hand on his shirt, pulling him close. His mouth on hers, his hands around her waist as she lifts her second hand to cup the back of his neck, her crutches falling to the ground and she hardly noticing, hardly noticing that she trusted him to hold her up, trusted him to catch her.

“Raven,” he says, his arms solid around her, and she leans back just a little, just enough to meet his eyes, and she doesn’t have to look at his mouth to tell he’s smiling. She realizes she’s smiling back, smiling back helplessly, except he doesn’t make her feel helpless, doesn’t make her feel like she has to be strong. Doesn’t need her to remake herself.

“Shut up and kiss me, you lug,” she says, her fingers curling into the soft hairs at the base of his skull, and his smile shifts into something crooked, but he does as she asks.)

_

This is what Raven has:

Enough.

-

  



End file.
